Faculty of Law, Common Law Section

Faculty of Common Law:

Help students at Canada’s largest law school create law for the future through hands-on experience.

“We provide our students with critical thinking skills, experiential learning opportunities and exposure to the unique perspectives of our diverse faculty and fellow students that will prepare them for any legal career in Canada or around the world.”

- Nathalie Des Rosiers, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section

For more than 50 years, the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section has been educating Canada’s top jurists and scholars, providing them with the foundation and the critical thinking skills they need to serve Canadians, in English and in French.

For more than 50 years, the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section has been educating Canada’s top jurists and scholars, providing them with the foundation and the critical thinking skills they need to serve Canadians, in English and in French.

Today, we are Canada’s largest law school, with more than 1,200 students. We have an international reputation for pursuing innovative approaches to research, teaching and learning. Through experiential learning opportunities at our law clinics, and in the Ian G. Scott Courtroom, our professors and students don’t just study past precedents or current legislation – they create law for the future.

Here are some of the projects your donation to the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, will help support:

Law and Technology

Our experts shape the laws required to keep up with constant innovation, by weighing in on critical policy debates on matters like the collection of metadata from cellphones to track owners’ movements or the legal and ethical issues surrounding the open data release of commuters’ travel patterns.

Their ground-breaking scholarship and work with students at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) has led to successful outcomes such as forcing Facebook to upgrade its privacy protections, ensuring user rights are respected, protecting Internet neutrality and making cellphone communication more affordable.

Health Policy and Law

At our new Centre for Health Law, Ethics and Policy, we are developing evidence-based solutions to the challenges that genetic testing and therapies, robotics and new reproductive technologies, drugs and medical devices pose, alongside the home and pharmacare needs of an ageing population.

Applying Canadian values of transparency, accountability and fairness to affordable health care for all requires evidence-based research and thoughtful deliberation that anticipates Canadians’ needs in the coming decades— health law for the future.

Giving Students Valuable Experience

Hands-on learning helps students choose the career they want to pursue and prepare them to transition to their professional lives. Our social policy fellowships give students the opportunity to learn by helping clients at our law clinics or working for non-profit organizations and community groups.

Students can also build a portfolio of briefs and other legal writing through the Legal Writing Academy, the brainchild of award-winning professors Adam Dodek and Ellen Zweibel. Through a unique program that also involves peer mentorship, writing cafés and advice from Canada’s best legal minds, students learn how to become the professional legal writers their jobs require.

Entrepreneurship Hub

Entrepreneurs—our dreamers and doers—generate almost a third of our gross domestic product and a quarter of our exports. Investing in our entrepreneurs is synonymous with investing in a strong and innovative economy that will continue to grow and adapt to the opportunities created by new technologies and discoveries.